Memory and Forgetfulness

". . . in
twenty-four years' teaching I have not had more than two such children,
but there are many--very many--who develop quite early a fondness for a
sort of infantile Nervana,--a condition of bodily and intellectual
quiescence, in which the subject sits happily still in school, with
never so interesting lesson going on, dreaming peacefully of things
altogether irrelevant, or of nothing at all."

"Lord Macaulay is said to have had the most
wonderful memory of his time; a memory so good, that he never forgot
anything once heard or read. A memory so good as this is not altogether
a subject for congratulation. It makes it so difficult to be original!"

All of you, I think, must have noticed how much more retentive the
memory is in childhood than at any later age: how quickly mere infants
learn poetry, for example, and enjoy the learning of it; but how
difficult it is for most of us who are grown up to remember perfectly
even a few verses.

It has been said that the reason is that in childhood the brain is like
a clean piece of blotting paper, unmarked by any impressions, and the
first impressions are without difficulty reproduced; as, by holding the
blotting paper up to the light, we can read the first letter or other
writing that has been blotted. But each fresh use of the blotting paper
makes it more difficult to read the message of the ink absorbed by it,
and similarly, each fresh series of impressions printed on the brain
makes it more difficult to recall previous impressions in their order
accurately. [This is not, of course, a scientific explanation of
Memory--it is perhaps no more than an analogy.]

And, for this reason, it is so important that the child's mind should be
stored with good and profitable and pleasurable recollections: that the
child's brain, while most impressionable and as yet unimpressed,
should receive, in so far as may be possible, only such impressions as
are healthy and will be useful and productive of happiness in later
life.

And here at the outset, as we observe the very dawn of thought, we are
struck by one phase of Memory--its capriciousness. Some things that a
child learns in infancy, it never forgets; others seem to pass away
completely, as though the impressions on the brain were absolutely
effaced so soon as the exciting cause has disappeared. For example, how
quickly a child forgets a language, learnt in infancy and spoken glibly
perhaps in childhood for years, if he passes to another country or
loses the companions who have spoken this particular language. I have
sometimes had boys come to my school who have been brought up in
France, or among French-speaking people--up to the age of five or six
bi-lingual, or perhaps more voluble in French--and their parents have
told me triumphantly, "You will find him very good at French; he spoke
it better than English till he was five or six": and strange to say,
more often than not, I have found such boys, if they have ceased to
talk French for six months before coming to school, have forgotten it
all, and are not one whit more quick to learn it again than boys
beginning for the first time. (Perhaps this is sometimes as well,
considering the accent of some nurses, French-speaking, but not French.)

And on the other hand, how often we find children whose lives are made
miserable by the memory of silly tales told them in their infancy! Such
children are afraid to pass through a field of harmless cows through
terror of their horns; or afraid to enter a dark room because of
ghosts; or have other sinister fears, which are sometimes no doubt
congenital and inherited, but which may more often, I believe, be
traced to the influence of some silly timorous adult who communicates
his or her own fears to the little one who should have protected from
such unnecessary terrors. I myself remember well and vividly spending
day after day in miserable apprehension during the hot summer of 1858,
when Donati's comet was flaming across one third of the visible sky,
because some thoughtless student of the stars had told me that the
world would very likely be destroyed by a comet.

And because the Memory is so much more retentive in childhood than at
any later period, it is all-important that children should be taught
young certain arts which, at a later age, are acquired slowly and not
without pain and grief, perhaps never perfectly. And first and
foremost, I believe very strongly that children should be taught, when
quite young, the art of reading. It has become the fashion of late
years to defer teaching a child to read until the age of seven, eight,
or even nine, instead of beginning at three, four, or five as was the
custom a generation ago. And the delay I believe to be a most serious
mistake. Sometimes the reason given for it is health. "The child," it
is said, "is not strong enough to learn." Sometimes the child seems
strong enough, but his parents wish him to be stronger still--or the
very strongest--to live out of doors entirely till he goes to school,
and then, they say, "with a body bursting with healthiness--with an
unclouded brain, an untaxed memory--he will learn fast enough!" My
experience, which is not a very narrow one, is that such boys, when
they do begin, do not learn fast enough--that, indeed, they find it very
hard to learn anything at all; and never, so far as my experience goes,
do they succeed in making up the time that has been lost. And, meanwhile,
it too often happens that the brain has not remained unused or
unclouded: for the brain is a self-acting machine that in childhood, at
any rate, loves to work; and, too often, those who are taught nothing
while young, in order that they may save their memories and grow so
strong in mind and body, do learn, unconsciously perhaps, and certainly
unknown to parents and guardians, things which they had better not have
learnt; if nothing worse, they are apt, like the late Laureate, when he
lost his train at Coventry, to have "with grooms and porters on the
bridge," and learn to loaf. [from Godiva, by Tennyson]

Of children who are certified by doctors as too delicate to learn
anything at all, I speak with some diffidence through fear of seeming
to be disrespectful to members of perhaps the noblest profession. But a
closer and more constant intimacy with children than doctors, as a rule,
enjoy, has led me to the belief in every case of this kind that has
come under my notice, and they are not a few, that the not teaching
anything has been a great mistake. Delicate boys are perhaps better
looked after than the strong boys, who learn nothing that they may
become physically stronger: they may not run the same risks of learning
what should not be learnt too soon, but they too often hear their
parents descant (with a kind of special pride) on their own
extraordinary delicacy, and this they invariably remember; they learn
their own symptoms: they learn at an abnormally early age the meaning
of those dread words "thermometer" and "temperature," which does them
more harm than the exertion of learning to read would do; and they
become miserable from lack of healthy occupation, morbid from
self-consciousness and introspection.

It used to be the custom to teach children when quite young (1) to
count and say the multiplication tables; (2) to know certain dates in
history, on the supposition, as before, that these arts are necessary
and that they are acquired with less effort and retained by the memory
with more accuracy when they are acquired in quite early youth. The
custom was a very good one, and the supposition on which it rested quite correct. But, for some years past, a
dead sot has been made by new educationists against the poor old
multiplication table and all historical dates; a dead sot that is
rather curious and amusing (when it does not irritate). It is based
apparently on the assumption that dates and tables are not only
unnecessary but positively harmful to the child's general intelligence,
if not to the special faculty of Memory--while if you are bent on
having dates and tables, you can pick them up with perfect ease in
later life.

It is only, I imagine, a pure idealist who believes, in spite of much
evidence to the contrary, that the millennium with the disappearance of
all need for money is already close upon us, who would deny that a
sound working knowledge of the multiplication tables is absolutely
necessary for safe conduct through the intricacies of life along the
high-ways and by-ways of housekeeping, to say nothing of home and
foreign travel. Well, my experience is, that if a boy does not know his
multiplication table till he is eight or nine (and many boys now do
not) he learns it afterwards with great difficulty; if he does not know
it by the time he is ten or eleven (and some boys now do not), it is
doubtful whether he will ever know it accurately, and use it
automatically without effort. Between six and eight a child can learn
his multiplication table without any serious effort. He will begin, of
course, in the concrete with an abacus, or better still, with toy
bricks, beans, or shells, and then, when he can write (which he ought to
be able to do by seven), he can build up his tables one by one on slate
or paper. To know them accurately and usefully will require much
practice and some conscious effort, but, at this early age, not much
effort, far less than if the learning be delayed two years or more.

As to dates, they are not so important from a utilitarian point of
view; but for the full or complete enjoyment of some of the greatest
pleasures of life, how useful, how indispensable! We cannot properly
enjoy old buildings, pictures, or most books that are worth reading,
without some knowledge of history, and history without dates is like a
picture without perspective, or worse--it is a veritable chaos.

This 'never-learn-a-date' fashion came in when I was a boy at Clifton
College, and I well remember how the then headmaster--now the Bishop of
Hereford--a man who has been in the forefront of reform of every kind
all through his life, set his face, with the grim smile peculiar to
him, against the fashion. "Learn your dates, man!" he would say, "learn
your dates! they are invaluable pegs to hang your facts upon." And
experience certainly tends to show that, if children do not begin by
learning the most important dates of the world's history when they are
quite young, they do not, as a rule, pick them up accurately
afterwards, that is, they do not possess a well-defined outline of
things as they have happened, with the chief corners and turning-points
marked as they should be, each in its proper place, with the indelible
ink of a good memory.

There are three kinds of memory--to quote Miss Rossi, whom some of you
may have had the pleasure of hearing here, in Wimbledon: "The memory of
the eye, the memory of the ear, and the memory of the understanding."
Things are naturally best remembered by all three working together, or
at any rate, by a combination of the last working with either of the
other two. The objectors to dates and multiplication tables sometimes
base their objections on the assertion that both always have been and
are still always taught without the understanding, simply and entirely
by rote. This may have been sometimes the case in past years, it may
sometimes be the case now, but that it is a general truth or even half
truth, is an assertion that is incorrect and inadmissible.

And even if it were quite true? The risk of injury to the intelligence
by making a child learn by heart what he does not understand, is less
than the risk of loss, not only of knowledge but of brain power, by
never setting him to learn anything unless it be certain that he
understands it. The modern educational war-cry of "no learning by
rote," has produced a wide-spread crop of inaccuracy and want of
thoroughness that is much to be deplored. For example: I not very long
ago questioned a class of about ten boys on a proposition of Euclid,
that had been lately learnt. The proposition had evidently been well
explained to them, and most of them seemed quite to follow and
understand the chain of reasoning, when once started; but not only
could no boy in the whole class begin at the beginning with a clean
black-board and go through the proposition correctly, but not one boy
could give the correct answer to the question, "What are you going to
prove?" because the young and enthusiastic master, who had taught them,
in his eagerness and determination to avoid the sin of teaching Euclid
by rote, had of set purpose and deliberately neglected the precaution
of making the whole class learn the enuntiation of the proposition by
heart. I would not make a fetich of verbal accuracy, but verbal
accuracy--like symbolism in other spheres of thought--does no harm to
the intellectually strong, and is of immense help to the memory and the
understanding of the weak.

So that in anything like the enuntiations of Euclid or grammar rules,
that are, after explanation and illustration, set to be learned,
"nailed down" Percival used to say, I do aim at, and sometimes insist on,
verbal accuracy, pointing out: "There are other ways of saying the same
thing right, but this is probably the best and shortest way: it is just
as easy for most of you to say it as it was written; for some of you
(no need to mention names), it is at present the only way."

Of course, the older boys become, the more their individuality asserts
itself, and the less need is there for bands and leading-strings of this
kind.

As all children do not learn by heart at the same rate, so all children
do not understand at the same rate. The natural and proper order is, of
course, to understand a thing first, and then commit it to memory. But
there are often cases when the process not only may, but must, if good
work is to be done, be reversed. Really obstinate children, who set
their faces and say aloud or to themselves, "I won't," are not so
common as they once were, or were supposed to be. I think in
twenty-four years' teaching I have not had more than two such children,
but there are many--very many--who develop quite early a fondness for a
sort of infantile Nervana,--a condition of bodily and intellectual
quiescence, in which the subject sits happily still in school, with
never so interesting lesson going on, dreaming peacefully of things
altogether irrelevant, or of nothing at all. For such young Buddhists,
who have not understood, because (unconsciously to themselves, perhaps)
they have not tried to understand, it is perhaps the best discipline to
make them commit to memory what they do not fully understand, and the
understanding soon comes afterwards.

Some people, even when grown up, find that the most easy and most
pleasant way to get at the meaning of anything difficult--for example,
and obscure piece of poetry--is to commit it first to memory; the full
meaning dawns with constant repetition. For my own part I am quite sure
that I never understood Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," or grasped
half the beauties in Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," and
several of Shakespeare's sonnets, till I had committed them to
memory--after I was grown up and for my own pleasure.

When I hear people insisting that nothing should be learnt by anybody
which is not first understood, I feel quite inclined to fly to the
opposite extreme, and argue gravely, in spite of reason, for the
absolute truth of Lewis Carrol's parody of the old economic proverb:
"Take care of the sounds and the sense will take care of itself."

Although it undoubtedly is, from some points of view, the proper and
natural order to understand first and then to remember, yet it is not
the way in which nature always works herself. How much does a child
really understand of all the words and phrases which it so glibly
utters when it has once begun to talk? Yet I have never heard of any
new educationist so cruelly consistent, as to forbid the child to use
any word or phrase which it could not explain. Would any child ever
read for amusement if it had to wait till it knew the meaning of all
the words?

One of the first books that I read and re-read with delight in my early
childhood, was an old copy, very slightly expurgated, of the "Arabian
Nights." I read till I knew all the stories, and enjoyed them more each
time I read them. But, quite lately, while visiting the house where
that old copy of the "Arabian Nights" still exists, I was absolutely
aghast to find how full the four volumes were, not only of strange
allusions--Eastern and quite inappropriate to modern notions of
propriety--which I cannot possibly have understood at all, but full
also of long sesquipedalian words, many of which I am sure I cannot
have been able then even to pronounce, much less understand.

On exactly the same principle, if we start when we are grown up to read
a new language for amusement or instruction, a language of which we may
and probably do have some knowledge to begin with, but a very small
vocabulary, we do not, if we wish to make rapid progress, laboriously
look out in our dictionary every word of which we do not understand the
meaning. If we have pursued this method, I fancy that the experience of
most of us have been the same; we have looked out the same word again
and again, and forgotten it again and again, unless we have added still
more to our labour by writing down the meaning on a slip of paper--and
then we have often lost the paper; but we choose a book we know will
interest us, with a plot or outline easy to follow; and we read boldly
on without stopping to look out a single word, inferring at once the
meaning of some new words and courageously skipping others which we do
not know. It is not a bad plan to lock the dictionary up in a drawer
and lose the key for a while. In this way, the number of words and
phrases not understood becomes less, and more progress is made in a week than in two
months' conscientious work with a dictionary.

I suppose that most of us, who are already grown up, if we do not
actually suffer from defective memories, would like our memories better
than they are.

Failures of memory may be divided roughly into two classes--(1)
Inability to remember forms and faces, (2) Inability to remember facts.
Failures of both kinds are mostly due to the same cause--want of
observation; and want of observation may be generally traced back to
want of interest, or to a divided interest. It is difficult to take an
interest in every thing, and perhaps unadvisable; but most of us would
have better memories if we could better concentrate our attention and
give undivided interest to whatever we may be doing. How irritating it
is to be one day introduced to someone fresh, someone perhaps whom we
have been eager to meet, and to be quite unable next day to remember
what he or she is like, unable to identify him or her again, though we
feel sure that we are going to meet again--are even now perhaps in the
same room together. We do not remember, because we did not look with
sufficient attention and learn the features at the first meeting. Very
likely, we were half thinking at the time of something else, thinking,
perhaps, that we must get a few words somehow with another friend, whom
we caught sight of disappearing through the doorway. It is said that
our Royal Family possess the ability to remember faces to a very marked
degree. The Prince of Wales is said never to forget a face that has
once been presented to him, or a name. But Mr. Pultney Bigelow claims
that the present Emperor of Germany carries off the palm in this
respect. Perhaps we may bracket them equal--uncle and nephew. I have
never mixed with Royalty myself, but I have observed the faculty in
people of lesser degree, whose walk in life brings them in contact
constantly with new faces. This power to remember faces is generally
coupled with the faculty of saying the right thing, if only a few
words, to the right person at the right moment. Such a man or woman
will talk to you, if only for a few seconds, as if he (or she) and you
were the only people in existence--as if this meeting was the one thing
they had been longing for, and then they pass on with a happy smile,
but hardly a pause, to the next conversation. I have been sometimes
struck by the way in which shopkeepers remember faces. I myself am
neither a great nor at all a confirmed smoker; I sometimes go a week
without a pipe, but when I do buy tobacco it is always "2 oz. of
Mayblossom." Not long ago I was in a shop in Wimbledon, where I do not
deal often or regularly; and falling into conversation with another
customer, I forgot to ask for what I wanted, and should have come away
without it; but the young lady in waiting very politely touched my
elbow, as talking still I turned to go, and handing me a 2 oz. packet,
said smiling, "Here is your Mayblossom, sir." I think that shop ought
to pay, and I believe it does.

More difficult than remembering whole faces is remembering special
features. How many of us here, I wonder, after meeting a new
acquaintance, could answer all three of these questions: "What coloured
eyes has he?" "Big mouth or small?" "What sort of nose?" Artists whose
business it is to portray these features, make the careful observance
of them one of their special studies. I have heard it said that about
the most difficult thing for an artist to remember and reproduce from
memory, is the shape of a pair of hands. A short time ago, there was a
picture in the Royal Academy called, I think, "A Rubber of Whist," in
which one of the most noticeable points was the exquisite delicacy with
which the hands holding the cards were painted, and what striking
differences there were among the four pairs! I was told at the time by
someone who appeared to know, that the artist--Mr. John Collier--makes
a special study of hands, and is accustomed and able, after meeting a
new acquaintance, to go home and reproduce his hands with all their
individuality on paper.

There is a good test of memory and observation of this kind in a
pleasant game, which some of you may have played. It requires a fairly
large party of which one division goes out of the room, and the players
of this division returning unseen one by one to a part of the room cut
off by a screen or curtain, exhibit only their two eyes through two
small holes cut in a curtain or screen. Or if you like, you can cut the
holes larger and exhibit both hands, with or without rings or
bracelets, according to agreement. The game is to remember and proclaim
whose eyes are looking at you, or whose hands are shown. Very difficult
it is to those who have not trained their memory to observe such
details. I believe that children and adults can do a great deal to
strengthen their memory by games of this kind. I was introduced to a
new one not long ago. We all sat round the table: one player left the
room and returned shortly with a large tray on which were deposited
about fifteen different articles collected in another room, e.g. a
corkscrew, a golf-ball, a pipe, a candlestick, a fossil, and so forth.
The tray was placed in the centre of the table and left there for
fifteen seconds by the tray-master's watch, and then removed from
sight. The players round the table were then given one minute in which
to enumerate with pencil and paper, previously provided, all the
articles seen on the tray. I was surprised to find how difficult it
was. I had never played the game before, and was last each time. I
never could remember more than nine things out of the fifteen.

There is another very good test of a good memory, but, for most of us,
rather too severe to be frequently applied. Take a pack of ordinary
playing cards (if there is anyone here who objects to card-playing, I
hope he will pardon the illustration)--take a pack of cards and
withdraw one card without looking at the face of it. Then deal the
remaining 51 cards--tolerably quickly--face upwards, each on the top of
the previous card, so that not more than one can be seen at a time. If,
at the end of the deal, you can say positively which card has not been
dealt, and prove that you are right by triumphantly showing the card
originally withdrawn--you may consider that you have an unusually good
memory, or, perhaps I should say, good whist memory; for I have heard of
good players say that the whist memory is a special faculty. I
myself should call it only one form of the face memory--the card face
memory. Like the memory of human faces, it is entirely a question of
close and careful observation; and to be perfect, there should be no
conscious effort of remembering. The good whist player watches intently
every card laid on the table and begins at once to draw his inference
as to the positions of the remaining cards of the suit being played.
But he does not, I think, ever say to himself in so many silent words
how many cards of each suit have already been played. To attain to a
good whist memory it is a truism, I suppose, to say that you must not
try to begin by remembering everything at first. A young player should
be quite content at first if he knows whether any and which particular
court cards are still left in any particular suit. And he will
gradually go on keeping an open eye for the tens and nines; and not
attempt to descend to the minutiae of the twos and threes till after
many days.

A good whist memory, which I covet but do not possess, always seems to
me a wonderful thing, but not so wonderful by a great deal as a good
chess memory. Most of us here, I fancy, would find it difficult, if not
impossible, to play one game of chess without looking at the board;
there have been players who could play thirteen at once. It is done by
intense power of concentrating the attention, and above all, by the
power to visualize. That is to say, I imagine that the blind-folded
chess player, after each and every move, sees in his mind's eye a vivid
picture of the board with all the pieces in their true and relative
positions.

Strange as it may seem, it does not need a really clever person to play
chess blind-folded. As a matter of fact, by way of parenthesis, the
"blind-folded" chess player is rarely, if ever, really blind-folded. He
sits comfortably in an armchair with his pipe perhaps in is mouth and
his back to the board or boards. The only blind-folded opponent that I
ever had was, in other respects, by no means an able man. He could never
become a clergyman, as he desired to do, through inability to pass
examinations, but he could play a good game of chess for an hour and a
half without looking at the board--and win.

Of equal importance with the face memory, and sometimes more
practically useful, is the place memory, by which we find our way along
roads or paths or no paths, where we have been perhaps only once
before. Like the face memory, this would seem, at first, to be a question
of eyes or no eyes. The man who observes narrowly all the turnings as
he goes, who looks out for and notes land-marks, who takes in the
contour of the ground and the peculiarities in shape of trees and
bushes, will be able to find his way back or along the same road again
more easily than one who walks, musing, as he goes, of other things. But
it is maintained by some that this is a special faculty and not Memory
at all. Popular language favours the supposition. "So and so has the
bump of locality very strongly developed," is one of the old
phrenological phrases that is still heard not unfrequently. And the
popular view receives some confirmation from the extraordinary homing
power possessed by many of the lower animals. I once heard it argued
that the homing faculty possessed by many of the lower animals might be nothing more than
Memory. A man, who has been cattle ranching in one of the Western
States of America, related how some cattle were abandoned by their
keepers in a wild mountain valley, many days' journey from any human
habitation. A drought had set in; they could find no water; under
stress of thirst, to save their own lives, the men climbed up a cliff
inaccessible to cattle, and so, by a comparatively short cut, reached
home and water, leaving the poor animals, as they supposed, to
inevitable death. But three weeks afterwards the cattle all turned up
quietly at home, "bringing their tails behind them," as if nothing
unusual had happened. I cannot remember the exact distance they had
traveled alone, but I think it was something like five hundred miles.
And the man who was there and told me the story, suggested that it was
possible that at each turn of the road, going anywhere, and at all
times, an animal says to himself in his own silent tongue: "Home now
lies yonder--in that direction," so that it keeps its bearing all
through even distant wanderings.

I must confess that this explanation does not commend itself to me.
Homing pigeons may perhaps fly home by sight. In the account of an
extraordinary balloon ascent from the Crystal Palace one day last year,
you may have read in the Westminster Gazette, how, at an altitude of
something over 25,000 feet, the whole of the south coast of England the
north coast of France were seen by the aeronauts spread out below them
like a map. If the human eye can see so much at once, and that too
under extraordinary difficulties of breathing, we do not know how far a
pigeon may not be capable of seeing. Dogs, sometimes, no doubt, find
their way home by smelling. But there are many instances from time to
time recurring, in which no help of this kind seems to have been
forthcoming. Dogs, and cats too, if newspaper stories are to be
credited, have found their way home again from Dublin to London, after
so many hours in the train and on board the steamer, probably with
their range of vision closed all the time, or very much restricted. A
young canine acquaintance of my own--a mere puppy--was taken by train
from Wimbledon to London, and, after three days' wandering through miry
places, where food was scarce and every boy's hand against it, found
its way home to the Worple Road. Except by train and cab, it had never
been that way before--it cannot have been a case of memory. And, if it
be granted that some of the lower animals possess a special faculty or
instinct for locality, which is not sight, nor smell, nor memory; it
seems niggardly to deny the possibility of the existence of the same or
a similar faculty in some, at least, of our species, even if reason does
for the most part over-ride and check our older and more valuable
instincts.

Of the Memory of animals much might be said. I suppose that all animals
which can be tamed at all, remember to some extent, down even to the
toad and the tortoise. The tortoise, who at present shares my garden
with me, began last spring, for the first time, to eat its simple meal
of clover quite contentedly while I sat by and watched it. I imagine
that it remembered at last, after several years' experience, that,
however queer-looking a creature I might be from the tortoise point of
view, I did not snap or try to bite its head off when it wished to
feed. The same tortoise, after unusually far wanderings during this
prolonged summer, has now gone back to burrow for the winter in
precisely the same corner of the garden that it chose last autumn,
which looks very like an act of memory.

Whether those wonderful little creatures, that are said by some to come
next in intelligence to man--I mean ants--whether they remember for
more than a few minutes at a stretch, I have often wondered, but do not
know.

Bees undoubtedly remember for days or weeks, possibly to the very limit
of their little lives, which endure in summer time, when work is
pressing, for not more than six short weeks. For, if the inhabitants of
the two hives quarrel and regularly declare war on one another, there
is no peace till one hive is absolutely vanquished. Night stops, but
does not end the fray. The battle goes on, weather permitting, day
after day till the dismal end is reached.

And, similarly, if bees are infuriated by senseless people flicking
annoying pocket-handkerchiefs, or otherwise unnecessarily annoying
them, they do not forget. This actually happened in my garden on one
memorable occasion; and for days the bees pursued and attacked any boy
found within twenty yards of their hive. I do not think that any adult
was stung on that occasion or any one at all beyond the school boys.
The bees appeared to pursue any one wearing the school cap. I wondered
at the time if they remembered it by the colour. At all events the
vindictive little creatures clung so tenaciously to the recollection of
the fact that they had been wantonly flicked by foolish school boys,
when all they wanted was to gather honey from the lime trees by the
gate, that after five days' anxious apprehension, in a state almost of
blockade, I packed up all the bees one quiet night, and took them off
altogether and for ever from the school.

But, naturally, the best memories among animals are possessed by those
who are most capable of being tamed and highly trained--elephants, dogs
and horses--before all others. There are stories innumerable, setting
for the the strong power of remembering possessed by these faithful
friends of man--stories going back from today nearly three thousand
years to the pathetic legend of the old hound Argus, who recognized his
master Ulysses, when, after twenty years wandering, he came home
disguised as a beggar--so altered that no one of his own kind knew
him--no loving creature but his faithful dog, who wagged his tail,
pricked up both his ears, and then and there, when he saw that he, too,
was remembered by his master, died of old age and joy.

One of the best instances of memory in a modern dog, I had from an old
country doctor, with whom I often used to drive out on his rounds. One
road along which we often drove came at one point quite close to the
river Frome. The doctor loved to tell how at this point, one autumn
day, when the river was flooded and running very strong, a large dog
which was following the carriage, slipped into the water. The banks
were so steep and slippery that he could not get out on either side;
and then, trying to swim up stream to low ground visible a little way
above him, the poor beast was slowly beaten back by the current and
would undoubtedly have been drowned, if his master had not, by voice and
gesture, directed him for some considerable way down stream to a spot
where landing was practicable. Some four years later, at the same time
of year, under similar conditions of flood, the doctor was driving past
that same place again with the same dog and a smaller one just emerged
from puppyhood. At identically the same spot, the younger dog slipped in
to the flood, whereupon, without a moment's hesitation, the old dog
plunged in and quickly piloted his young companion to the same place
where he had himself emerged successfully four years before.

Of elephant stories, we have not so many here in England--for obvious
reasons--we have not so many elephants. But here is one. A modern story
compared to that of Argus--but still more than three hundred years old.
It is related by Montaigne--though it was not long ago given (without
acknowledgment) in one of our evening newspapers as an event of recent
date.

A man went from home on a long journey, leaving his favorite elephant
in charge of--as he supposed, an honest servant. But the servant, who
had long eyed grudgingly the large amount of provender provided for the
elephant's daily sustenance, kept the poor creature all through his
master's absence on half rations--devoting the other half to his own
profit. On the master's return he noticed at once how thin the elephant
had become; and when feeding time first came round he accompanied his
servant to the stable to see his favorite take its food. A full ration
had been of course supplied; but the elephant carefully and elaborately
divided the heap at once with his trunk into two equal portions; and
pushing one half towards this dishonest and now discovered servant,
proceeded to consume the other. Even amidst unaccustomed plenty, he did
not forget or forego the pleasure of a just revenge.

Of the memory of horses there are, no doubt, stories among the Arabs;
but I do not know any. Nor have I ever heard anything distinctive about
the memory of cats.

Some people suppose that the migratory instinct in birds is an act of
inherited memory, though it is very difficult to find out, and I
believe it is still a matter of doubt, whether the young birds in their
migration are accompanied, or not, by guides and escorts of a previous
generation.

The place memory, from which sprang this long, but I hope, not too
wearisome digression upon animals, is invaluable in military
operations. General Gordon attributed his extraordinary success in
crushing the formidable Taeping rebellion in China to a large extent to
his memory for places, and to the fact that, owing to this power, he
had a more intimate acquaintance than most of the natives even with the
intricate canals and other by-ways round Pekin, among which he had
wandered for amusement, but not aimlessly; and he was thus able to
concentrate his forces where they were from time to time required, with
more speed and precision than the rebels who were opposed to him
supposed possible.

And again, in that most interesting book that has lately been published
Forty-one years in India, we learn how Lord Roberts owed much of his
success at the beginning of his military career to this same place
memory, which he possessed and cultivated to good purpose during the
Mutiny of 1857.

Next to be considered is the remembering of facts. Facts in relation to
memory are of three kinds: Those that we wish to remember; Those which
we do not care about either way; and, Those which we wish to forget.
Facts of the last class we naturally remember best.

Names and numbers give a good deal of trouble. Names of people whose
faces we remember, whom we know that we know; and names of streets to
which we are going for business or pleasure and which we have forgotten
to write down. The vexing part of it is, that few of us like to have
our names and individuality forgotten--to be asked to explain our own
identity. I have known one man so touchy on the subject, that when an old acquaintance, whom he greeted,
confessed to having forgotten who he was, he turned away affronted; and
when the other man afterwards remembered his name and came up to renew
old days with--"You are so-and-so, I remember now,"--naming himself
right, he would not be pacified, but angrily denied himself--"No, I am
not so-and-so, and I do not care to be remembered now." Since this
episode, I have been very careful, and never volunteer the information
that I have forgotten any one's name. It is often awkward, but a few
minutes conversation carefully handled will generally bring back the
missing memory.

Numbers are more easily remembered, at any rate small ones. It is a
good plan to perform some small arithmetical sums with a new number
that you wish to remember, when first you hear it. So, when my sister
went to live at 138, Upper Street, as soon as I heard the number I
said:--"2 into 138-69; 3 into 69-23; twice three times twenty-three,"
and I never forgot it as long as she lived there, though, why twice
three times twenty-three should be easier to remember than 138 is a
mystery which I cannot explain.

For larger numbers, dates especially, there are various mnemonic
contrivances, which some find helpful and others valueless. Those who
wish to try any such aids, cannot do better, I believe, than consult
Professor Stokes' book on Memory, which, I must confess, that I have
never read.

To go back for a few moments to names. A peculiar name, with an unusual
collocation of syllables, is always more easily remembered, even if
long, than a short and common sounding name. For example, in teaching
geography, boys have rarely to be told twice the name of Bab-el-man-deb
among straits, or Popocatepelt among mountains; though Mount Blanc is
almost invariably forgotten, and was given back to me on occasion by an
American boy, brought up in Paris, as "Blanc Mange." The long sonorous
names of Jewish history are, as a rule, easily retained. The names of
the Patriarch Job's three daughters, Jemima, Keziah, and Karen-happuch
are often remembered with ease by young students, who are entirely
ignorant of other really more interesting and far more important
historical heroines. And, in the story of Sennacherib, the last
resounding verse, telling of the great king's dismal end, with its five
difficult proper names containing seventeen syllables between them,
will stick in a memory that finds it difficult to retain an equal
number of simple syllables from the Beatitudes.

In learning poetry or anything else by heart, it is a very great point
to avoid all conscious mental strain. There will generally be effort of
some kind; except with the very strongest and most phenomenal memories,
there must be effort. But when consciousness of the effort begins to
override all other feelings, it is generally the best policy to stop
learning for a time--to rest. If you set yourself to learn a piece of
poetry over night, you may often put it away known quite imperfectly,
perhaps not half known, and find in the morning that with once reading
it through, or even some time without reading it through, you know it
thoroughly.

One of my friends, a lady, who has the most wonderful memory I have
ever known, has put the same idea in a somewhat different and decidedly
original way. She writes:--"When there is an extraordinary difficulty in
learning any special subject, at the same time with anxiety to learn
it, and some distress at not being able to do so, it is a good way to
shelve the whole thing for a time and then go back to it by quite
indirect routes--take in the remembering faculty like a shying horse."
This simile of a shying horse strikes me as being very good.

Some years ago I heard a great deal of a young man--quite young, under
twenty--who was studying for an interpretership under the Turkish
government. Languages were his hobby. At the time that I became
acquainted with other members of his family--for him I never saw--he
knew seventeen different languages, and was still adding to his stock.
He used to learn his languages four at a time. He had four reading
desks in his room, each with a set of books on one language; and he
would study at each desk fifteen minutes only, and then pass on to
another, finding the change restful.

How often in the morning, after a good night's rest, we see clearly how
to shape our course of action in some difficult matter that baffled us
utterly over night. And, the brain baffled simply through weariness,
does not always wait for the morning to resume active operations. Many
instances have been known of mathematicians solving, in their sleep,
difficult problems which had beaten them in over night. And, in the
same way, classical scholars have been known sometimes to translate in
their sleep into satisfactory Latin verses difficult pieces of English
poetry, which they had been quite unable to render to their
satisfaction over night.

There are one or two curious anecdotes bearing on this phenomenon in
Andrew Lang's book on "Dreams and Ghosts." Here is the best of them. A
man went to the post late one night with a bundle of letters. On his
return home, he found that he had lost a cheque, received that evening.
He went sorrowful to bed, and sleeping, dreamed that he saw the cheque
curled round an area railing between his house and the post. He woke,
got up, immediately dressed, went out and found the cheque exactly
where and as he had seen it in his dream, curled round an area railing.
Without being disbelievers in the supernatural, we may explain this
naturally. The man, in all probability, dropped the cheque on his way
to the post, and, returning, did actually see it with his bodily eyes
curled round the railing where the wind had blown it; but his brain,
through weariness and exhaustion, failed to register the impression
audibly, so to speak; the tired man was unconscious of what he saw.
But, as soon as body and brain were a little rested, the impression
forthwith sprang into vividness and became a real mental picture.

There is, in the same collection, another quite similar story of a lady
who lost a bunch of keys in a wood and dreamed that she found them
under a certain tree, where, in fact, she did, next morning, find them.
This admits of the same explanation.

Many of us here tonight, though we may not have had such luck with
curious dreams, have, probably, more than once lost something or other
that we have searched for at once and for some length in vain. Then,
after going away on other business or pleasure, we have returned and
found the lost treasure immediately without any hunting.
Hitherto--until I read Mr. Lang's book--I had always supposed instances
of this kind to be nothing but coincidences--freaks of chance. But, may
it not be that when we come back to the scene of our loss, fresh and
rested, we remember where we dropped or put down our lost ball, knife,
thimble, or scissors, with more vivid exactness than when we discovered
our loss and began the search?

I heard, not long ago, an amusing and quite authentic memory anecdote
of a slightly different complexion, but bearing on the same point--brain weariness and after-recollection. A man, known to himself and his
friends to be what is called "absent-minded," was returning home one
night from one of our large city banks in which he was employed, with a
part of his salary, drawn that day, in his pocket, in the shape of a
£100 note. When he reached home and began to change his clothes,
the note was gone! All his pockets were searched thoroughly in vain.
Suddenly he remembered how, as he stood chatting in Chancery Lane with
a friend, met accidentally, in his own old absent-minded fashion, he
had rolled and re-rolled into a ball a bit of old paper drawn from his
pocket, or somewhere else. And then quickly the further impression came
back that, still talking and thinking consciously of nothing but the
matter under discussion, he finished his paper pellet to his own
half-conscious satisfaction and took aim and threw it, and was glad
with half-conscious gladness when it passed through the hole in the
scraper at which he had aimed. £100 was too much even for a
banker to lose; he went back at once to Chancery Lane, stood in the
very same spot where he had stopped to chat, identified the scraper,
and behind it found his paper pellet. It was his £100 note!

In this same book of Mr. Lang's, on "Dreams and Ghosts," there was an
explanation quite new to me of a strange phenomenon that has, no doubt,
puzzled most of us, that strangest of all strange sensations--that we
have surely been through this before. Somewhere and somewhen we have
heard before all that you are saying now, we know exactly what you are
going to say next; it is on the tip of our tongue to tell you, but we
can't tell you, till you have said it; and then we see that we were
right. Is it really a recollection of past days? An indication, if not
a proof, of a previous existence? Mr. Lang philosophically suggest that
it may be merely the two halves of the brain not working
simultaneously--one side is just a trifle a front of the other. Whether
this is so or not is not for an unscientific schoolmaster to determine.
Certainly, Wordsworth's explanation appeals more strongly to me:--

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us--our life's star--
Has had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of Glory do we come
From God who is our home."

It has often struck me that the sin of plagiarism is probably due more
often to the unconscious exercise of memory than to downright literary
dishonesty.

The inference which have just drawn that seemingly prophetic dreams are
not necessarily supernatural, suggests another tradition with respect
to memory, which I have never been able to verify. It is said that
drowning men recall without conscious effort in one vivid flash of
memory all the events of their past life. I dislike upsetting
traditions, but the only man I have ever known to have been nearly
drowned did not have this experience. Buffeted by breakers off the
shore while bathing, he had lost all power of speech, all power of
moving any limb, all hope of life. But I have heard him say there was
no recollection of the past, no fear for the future; only a grim sense
of irritation at the irony of the present: to be drowned like this in
sight of the shore, within hail of hundreds, if he could only raise his
voice and cry--with his feet actually dragging on the sand!

So again of other forms of what threatens to be the death agony. I met
an old friend once after many years of separation, and we talked of
school days and, of course, of cricket. "No," he said, "I can't play
cricket now, because of my stiff shoulder." Then I remembered, what I
ought not to have forgotten, how, in India, he had been partly eaten by
a tiger. And thirsting for information, I at once rushed in with eager
questions: "Did you feel any pain? Were you frightened or did the
creature mesmerize you? And did you, before losing consciousness,
remember in one flash all your past life?" "No," he answered, "there
was no pain (till afterwards) and no recollection of the past, nor
fears--only a dreamy sensation of wonderment at the funny noise it
makes to hear your own bones being scrunched."

A paper on memory would hardly be complete, without some allusion to
famous historical memories. Lord Macaulay is said to have had the most
wonderful memory of his time; a memory so good, that he never forgot
anything once heard or read. A memory so good as this is not altogether
a subject for congratulation. It makes it so difficult to be original!
When a man remembers always word for word what other people have
thought and said on any particular subject, it must often be hard not
to reproduce their works verbatim, instead of reclothing the same ideas
in a new dress, as a man, with a less perfect memory, perforce must do.

Montaigne, to instance a writer who was, or claimed to be, at the
opposite pole, from whose reflections we, with bad memories, may draw
some consolation--Montaigne, in his amusing Essay on "Lyars," begins by
ascribing to himself the very worst memory and the most treacherous
that ever was. But he goes on to mention incidentally that memory and
understanding are not the same thing. For "a strong memory," he
alleges, "is commonly coupled with infirm judgment." And
notwithstanding the misery and inconvenience of it, he says; "I derive
these comforts from my infirmity: first, that it is an evil from which
principally I have found reason to correct a worse, namely ambition;
this defect being intolerable in those who take upon them the
negotiations of the world, an employment of the greatest honour and
trust, among men. Secondly, that she has fortified me in my other
faculties proportionally as she has furnished me in this; I should
otherwise have been apt implicitly to have reposed my wit and judgment
upon the bare report of other men, without ever setting them to work
upon any inquisition whatever, had the strange inventions and opinions
of the authors I have read been ever present with me by the benefit of
memory. Thirdly: that by this means I am not so talkative; for the
magazine of the memory is ever better furnished with matter than that
of the invention; and had mine been faithful to be, I had, ere this,
deafened all my friends with my eternal babble, the subjects themselves
rousing and stirring up the little faculty I have of handling and
applying them, heating and extending my discourse. 'Tis a great
imperfection, and what I have observed in several of my intimate
friends who, as their memories supply them with a present and entire
review of things, derive their narratives from so remote a fountain,
and crowd them with so many impertinent circumstances, that, though the
story be good in itself, they make a shift to spoil it; and if
otherwise, you are either to curse the strength of their memory or the
weakness of their judgment."--Collin's Translation, 3rd edition, 1700.

Planche, the burlesque writer, antiquary and dramatist, whose memoirs
appeared some twenty-five years ago, used to affirm, it is said, with
truthfulness, that he could hear a play read once and reproduce it from
beginning to end correctly. I am not sure if it was Planche or another
who, after hearing a young author read aloud a fairly long play, said
by way of having a joke: "Come, come, you are not going to pretend that
you wrote that yourself? Why, I have known it by heart for years! I can
say it all through," and he began to do so. The poor young author, in
desperation at the though that he must have gone mad and copied
unwittingly, tore his precious MS. into fragments; whereupon Planche,
if it was he, good-naturedly confessed his trick, and his abnormal
memory; and at once proceeded to dictate the play, which in due time
was written down again in its entirety.

One of the most extraordinary memories that have ever been known was
possessed by the great classical scholar of Cambridge at the end of
last century--Richard Porson. His father, deliberately and of set
purpose, trained his memory from a child by making him perform all the
ordinary processes of arithmetic entirely in his head. So that, by the
time he was nine years old, Porson could extract cube roots entirely in
his head.

When he went to Eton at the age of 15, he knew by heart most of the
classical books that were then read in that school: i.e., almost all
Horace, Virgil, the Iliad, with parts of Cicero, Livy and the Odyssey.
A story is told of him that, as he was going into school one day, a
mischievous companion substituted another book for his Horace--the
subject of the lesson. Young Porson was not in the least disconcerted,
but when his turn came to construe, held up the other book, repeated
the Latin of the lesson and translated it, so that his schoolfellow's
trick passed undiscovered by the master. It is somewhat sad, and yet in
a way consoling for the rest of us, who forget better that we remember,
that Porson, in spite of his prodigious memory--which was coupled with
prodigious ability of other kinds--did practically nothing, but
criticize and correct or restore the old classical authors. It was said
that the restoration and translation of the Rosetta stone, on which he
spent some time and trouble, was not so good and valuable as that done
by a less learned man (Heyne); and, except to a very small circle of
intimate friends, he was neither a good conversationalist nor an
agreeable companion.

I should like to give you an instance of the singularly accurate and
retentive memory of the lady from whom I quoted a while ago. Talking
(in 1896 I think) of the Rontgen Rays and an article that had appeared
in one of the newspapers a propos of Odic Light, she observed: "But
this is nothing new. A German, named Reichenbach, discovered it forty
years ago. There was an article about it when I was a girl in the old
Household Worlds." Then in a musing tone to herself: "Yes, it must have
been in March, fifty-seven." And going to the shelf, she took down the
bundle of the numbers of Household Words for 1857, and turned at once
to the article in question. There were also articles on the same
subject in the same Magazine for 1852 and 1853, which she then
mentioned and found immediately. To the best of her recollection she
had not re-read or thought of the articles since they appeared.

The instinct of a schoolmaster--or if you will, the perversity of a
pedagogue--brings me back to my boys. The best memory that I ever
encountered among boys was in the first pupil that I ever had at
Wimbledon. He now holds some official position in Singapore. The first
morning that he came to school, he told me that his mother had taught
him the Latin Grammar to the end of amo. I spent the first quarter of
an hour in closely questioning him on what he had learnt, and I did not
receive a single incorrect answer. The second quarter of an hour I
spent in pointing out the similarities and differences of the other
three conjugations of verbs with and from the first. After this, he
knew his regular verbs and could use them. We never had occasion to go
back to that part of the grammar again. No one who has never taught
Latin to boys can realize the singular pleasure that thus was mine,
thanks to this boy's good memory--and his mother.

Another boy, who also stands out as one of the five best pupils of my
twenty-two years in Wimbledon--now an artillery officer--once surprised
me very much by an unexpected display of his invariably good memory.

One Ash Wednesday morning, I remembered with some annoyance that I had
forgotten again, as I had done for several years in succession, to
remind my day pupils on the Tuesday that the following day being Ash
Wednesday, they were to bring their prayer books to school, as we
should all go to church. Creswell was sitting next to me, and I said in
my despair at my own forgetfulness, more than half jestingly: "Oh!
Creswell, do remind me next Shrove Tuesday to tell all the boys to
bring their prayer books on Ash Wednesday morning." Next Shrove
Tuesday, at breakfast time I had forgotten again as usual; but not so
Creswell. With the most polite of smiles he began: "Will you remind the
boys this morning, Sir, to bring their prayer books to-morrow, as we
shall go to church."

I had intended to say something more about the strange capriciousness
of memory; but this paper threatens to be too long already. Yet, I
cannot refrain from quoting the well-known story from Sir Walter Scott,
of the old Scotchman, whose minister was complimenting him on his
excellent memory. "Na, Na, your Reverence," said the old man, "my
memory is a very wilful thing; it only remembers just what it likes.
Now, if your Reverence preached to me an hour, I don't suppose I should
remember a word!"

The Correlative of Memory is Forgetfulness. To treat of Forgetfulness,
if I may do so for a few minutes, is not to treat a new subject--hardly
a new side of the original theme of Memory. But the very word "Forget"
seems to suggest some other points of view. And first, if, as before, I
may say a few brief words about your children. Possibly you are tired
of children? I myself am sometimes tired of them. But to save my own
soul, so to speak, as a teacher I must say it. Do not, I implore you,
accept that easy and fatal phrase, "I quite forgot!" as a valid and
sufficient reason for the non-performance of any duty, however trivial.
Of course, children will forget; and I do not say that you should
always (Heaven forbid), visit Forgetfulness with severity. But do not
fail to point out that Forgetfulness of Duty is generally avoidable and
always culpable. If a schoolboy finds that he has a young and
sympathetic teacher--prone, no doubt, sometimes himself to forget, who
takes the phrase "I quite forgot!" as a valid excuse, and does not have
the forgotten exercise written after school--you would be astonished, I
am sure, to learn how soon forgetfulness becomes a habit to that boy,
how soon it becomes as easy to him to forget regularly, as it is to his
perhaps less gifted but more laborious schoolfellow to regularly write.

Yet I fancy that no one but a teacher--perhaps not even he--has ever
fathomed the extraordinary depths to which real forgetfulness can go in
children. I remember once keeping a boy back from football as a
punishment for dipping his finger in the inkbottle and drawing pictures
with inky fingers on the desk. When I came back from the Common, I went
up to the detained boy in the schoolroom to look over his work and
release him from durance, with an admonition not to do it again; and I
began: "Well, Spencer, why have you been kept in this afternoon, while
the rest of us have been enjoying ourselves in the Common?" He looked
up with a sad air and dipping his finger slowly in the ink bottle as he
spoke and beginning a fresh diagram on his desk, he answered sadly: "I
can't remember, Sir." The baffled schoolmaster acknowledged to himself
that he was beaten, and sent the boy--with his forgetful ink-stained
fingers--out to play without another word.

There was a boy once at my school, who was of a dreamy poetical nature:
he was the son of a well-known novelist and, as happens sometimes with
people of genius, he was not fond of washing. He came down one morning
with a face still wearing a very fair allowance of yesterday's dirt,
and I asked him immediately: "Groves, have you washed this morning?" He
looked both hands carefully over before replying, and seeing that they
were fairly clean, answered decidedly, "Yes, Sir!" "But your face,
Groves, your face; did you wash your face?" Either from a prudent
resolve to hedge, or because he judged from the expression of my face
that all was not quite well, or because he really did at last remember:
"No, not my face, Sir." Then we climbed at once together to his
bedroom, and found water indeed in the washing basin, but water that
was absolutely clean, no trace of dirt or soap. And the soap itself in
its own receptacle, more dry and hard than when it came from the store
cupboard. Sponge, flannel and towel, all feeling as dry as if they had
not touched water for weeks. We concluded together that he had not
washed. To one who knew the boy, it seemed an act of genuine
forgetfulness. We left him washing.

One more instance, and I will have done with boys. Throwing stones is
forbidden on our school premises, as well as in all roads and public
places: not from pedagogic vindictiveness or because we wish to make
little lives miserable by prohibitions; but because we have known
serious injuries result from stone-throwing in a crowd. As I was
passing through the playground one morning, a comparatively new boy,
who was standing with his back to me and did not see me, stopped when I
was about three yards from him, picked up a stone and threw it at
another boy. Before he had recovered himself from the action of
throwing, I put my hand on his shoulder and said, "Williams! throwing
stones in the playground!" Instantly, without a moment's hesitation and
with an air of most reproachful innocence:--"I, Sir! no, Sir! I didn't
shy a stone, Sir!" I took him in and he paid the penalty prescribed for
stone-throwing. But all the same, I could not help wondering, as I
reflected on the indignant air of innocence with which he denied the
action committed under my very nose, whether it were possible that he
had, even in that moment of time, completely forgotten. This could only
be possible on the assumption that stone-throwing had become with him a
habit, and was done automatically (as we wind up our watches and forget
that we have wound them); so that I felt quite sure that, in my case, the
penalty was not misapplied. But boys are funny creatures and
unfathomable in other ways as well as in their ability to forget.

And well it is for the boy that he can sometimes forget! If he forgets
his Latin verbs and multiplication tables, and rules of discipline, he
forgets also, with most commendable celerity, the punishments and
scoldings; and is as cheerful and friendly almost at once, as if no
cloud had ever arisen between you. I saw a man once beat a retriever
dog quite cruelly, and then immediately fling the whip over and eight
foot wall and send the dog for it, to show the poor creature's docility
and forgiving disposition. The dog leaped the wall without hesitation
and in a few seconds laid the whip fawning at his master's feet. Boys
are like that. I do not mean that they are beaten cruelly, or that they
leap eight foot walls, but that, like good old Sir Anthony, they are
always ready to "forgive and forget."

Staying in Scotland some few years ago, before I had begun to regard
myself as anything but quite a young man, I heard a dear old
Presbyterian minister read prayers one morning, and in the course of
his prayer, he gave thanks for--among other blessings--this: that a
knowledge of the future is mercifully concealed from us. It was a new
idea to me; indeed, I had often before this thought how pleasant it
would be to have the power of foreseeing things to come. But I too, now
that I am older, am thankful for the merciful concealment. And I count,
moreover, another cause for thankfulness in this: that we are, to a
large extent, enabled mercifully to forget the past.

Some things it is well that we should not forget, and some we would
forget, but cannot, though we would. The sight of an upturned drowning
face, with no one but children by--no strong man near to stretch out a
hand and save!

The sound of a madman's cry for "help" as they caught him coming out of
church on Sunday morning and took him off to the asylum.

And "worse than worst," the smell of the still smouldering cottage,
burnt down in the night with its sleeping occupants!

These are memories that can never be entirely forgotten, and that will
come back from time to time after nearly forty years, with a vividness
still almost terrifying.

But of all the sadness, sorrow and disappointment, which crowd in upon
us almost daily as we grow older, how much--how appallingly much!--is
there that we do forget utterly, sometimes unconsciously to ourselves,
sometimes of set purpose putting it resolutely behind us, that we may
still, notwithstanding disappointment, sorrow and sadness, have vigour
and freshness to do our daily work. And happy it is that--kindly Nature
helping us--we are so often able to forget.